SEGREGATION STUDY DUE IN DELRAY

DELRAY BEACH -- After saying that a recent School Board decision will bring "de facto" segregation to Delray Beach, city commissioners decided on Tuesday to hire a legal expert to question whether new school boundaries are constitutional.

"If they'll bus a black child from here to Boca, they should do the vice versa," Mayor Doak Campbell said after his colleagues agreed to spend up to $4,000 to analyze last month's School Board decision, which some people say deliberately creates racial imbalance at S.D. Spady Elementary and could cause the school to close eventually.

The decision to cut Spady's enrollment by almost one-half next year, leaving it almost 70 percent black, was a "deliberate" move to resegregate Spady, said Lillie Parker, leader of a group that petitioned the School Board to maintain a racial balance of at least 50-50 at Spady.

Overall, 20 percent of students in Palm Beach County's schools are black and the remaining 80 percent are considered white, she said.

A 1970s court ruling that Palm Beach County had a "unitary school system" meant that each school did not have to achieve racial balance as long as the county system was balanced overall, Parker explained.

But Parker said the ruling forbade deliberate segregation of a school, which she said has now happened at Spady.

The new racial balance at the school may be used in the future as a School Board rationale for closing Spady, and that would violate the board's stated policy of keeping older schools open, said Parker, a graduate of the school.

Developer Tom Fleming said School Board decisions over the past few years have enhanced Boca Raton at the expense of Delray Beach.

"We need to muster our strength and show (the School Board) how serious we are," Campbell said on Tuesday. A June 11 meeting has been set up between the City Commission and the School Board to address the question.

In other action, city commissioners:

-- Called for renewed consideration of a new definition of family to try to limit crowding in city homes.

-- Heard testimony from residents of two beachside neighborhoods who do not want a fire station as a neighbor. Commissioners will decide the issue on Tuesday.